Transcoding on Older NVIDIA Graphics Card

NVIDIA is a well-known graphics card company that received a lot of attention on Linux, benefiting from both official proprietary drivers and an opensource driver named nouveau. Unfortunately, support progressively got phased out for older NVIDIA models such that it is seemingly difficult to use an older NVIDIA card with Linux. There are some legacy drivers provided with distributions such as Debian, but they are still not supported by end-user applications. For instance, Plex states that as of recent versions, Plex requires NVIDIA GPU driver 470.141.03 or higher which makes it impossible to use older NVIDIA cards.

Fortunately, the nouveau open-source driver can be used together with the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) in order to enable hardware transcoding on older NVIDIA cards.

In other to make hardware acceleration via VA-API work for an older NVIDIA, first make sure that the nouveau driver is loaded on startup. To be sure, the driver can be loaded from initramfs by adding the nouveau driver to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and then the image can be rebuilt by issuing update-initramfs -k all -u, followed by update-grub to boot the new initramfs on startup.

After booting, the nouveau driver should install a framebuffer which should allow larger resolutions. The next step is to install nvidia-vaapi-driver by issuing:

aptitude install nvidia-vaapi-driver

It should also be helpful to install vainfo in order to issue vainfo -a to check the current capabilities of the graphics card.

If everything is set up correctly, then the device at /dev/dri/renderD128 should exist along with /dev/dri/card0. If /dev/dri/renderD128 does not exist, then something is not set up correctly.

The /dev/dri/card0 and /dev/dri/renderD128 devices can be used for transcoding now and, in case Docker is used as a container technology for Plex or Jellyfin, then both devices should be passed to the Plex or Jellyfin container as explained on the Docker workarounds page.